


A Million Points in Time

by NellyNee



Series: Family Breakfast AU [1]
Category: Danny Phantom
Genre: Domestic Fluff, F/M, Family Breakfast AU, Getting Together, Jack and Maddie check in on Vlad in the hospital like normal people, Jack shares this issue and we aren't talking about it, Jack was serious in canon once and I'm running with that into a wall, Living Together, M/M, Mentions of time typical race and lgbt issues because those things exist in the 80's, Multi, No one is gayer for Vlad than Jack, OT3, Other, Pre-Series, There's less ghosts in this than I wanted, Unreliable Narrator, Vlad has anger issues, Vlad has budding control issues, Vlad has issues is all I'm saying, Vlad has money issues, Vlad is a klepto, one of those issues is his mullet, we'll get to that I promise
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-21
Updated: 2016-10-27
Packaged: 2018-08-16 12:06:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 16,749
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8101780
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NellyNee/pseuds/NellyNee
Summary: Jack and Maddie visit Vlad in the hospital after his accident with the proto-portal. The resulting year and a half is one hell of a ride.(Based on the Family Breakfast AU by ghost-chicky, in which Jack and Maddie stick around after the accident, and all three of them fall in love)





	1. The Before: 01

**Author's Note:**

> Wow does this bring me back. My first fanfiction I ever wrote was for this Phandom. So imagine my surprise when I find a booming community on tumblr more than ten years after it's ending! Why did no one tell me about this!?
> 
> In any case, I saw some fan art and got HELLA inspired by ghost-chicky's FANTASTIC art on Tumblr. This little romp is based off their Family Breakfast AU (Named because, and I quote, "As in the Fenton ‘family’and Vlad’s nickname ‘fruit loop’a popular cereal") in which Maddie and Jack visit Vlad in the hospital lots after his accident, find out about his powers, and basically become the Sam and Tucker to his Danny, eventually resulting in them all falling hopelessly in love with each other and dating, leading all the way until canon time, raising Jazz, Danny, and Dani as a family unit. 
> 
> It will rot your teeth, but if you're reading this you must be interested, so please, go check it out, their art is FANTASTIC
> 
> http://ghost-chicky.tumblr.com/tagged/Family-Breakfast-AU
> 
> I do have this mostly done, and it should end up about 4-6 chapters, updating every Wednesday.

The ectoplasmic light from the proto-portal was brighter than she had expected. Not for the first time, she'd wish Jack would pause for a moment in his excitement on ghosts. It's one of his most endearing qualities, that childlike wonder and joy bubbling from his massive frame, but she really would have liked to have put on some safety goggles first. At the very least.

 

It's not until she hears the moaning that she suspects something's gone horribly wrong.

 

Her first though is of Jack, but just a glance tells her he's alright, large fists rubbing at his eyes in an attempt to dispel the purple flashes and spots still dancing across her own vision. Which only leaves...

 

“Vlad?”

 

He's hunched over the counter next to the small portal, which is letting off a dull glow. Her first thought is that his vision had been affected much worse than theirs, from the way his hands are cupping his face. Then the portal gives an alarming crackle before disappearing completely. It's glow dissipates, but Vlad continues to let off his own light, a faint halo visible even in the bright florescent of the science lab.

 

She hisses through her teeth in shock. Dear god, the ectoplasmic flare had _hit_ him.

 

She ignores her instincts, which tell her to run over and catch Vlad even as he shudders to his knees, and runs as quickly as she can to the dispenser on the wall, tugging on a pair of rubber gloves and a half mask.

 

“Man, that was gnarly! You ok Mads, V-man?”

 

Jack's suit, bless him, already has gloves, but she balls a mask up to weight it down and tosses it in Jack's direction without looking before hefting the large, heavy, rubber apron at the contamination center over her shoulders.

 

“Jack, put this on and then go to next door to the Professor's office and call the hospital.”

 

“Hospital? Wait who needs a-” She's already weaving around the lab tables, and she can see Vlad's feet where he's turned around and sat on the floor, but nothing else. Whatever Jack sees quiets him though, and it's a little disturbing to see him quiet and complacent, as he tugs on the mask and runs out the door without another word.

 

When she gets there, Vlad's already shuffled to his feet again, away from the contamination center and towards the door, as if to run away.

 

(In another life, she might have not heard the moaning until Vlad lets out a distressed cry. She might have gone to Jack and brushed the tears that rubbing his eyes brought away to check on his vision. She might have turned just in time to gasp in alarm in Jack's arms at the anger in Vlad's eyes before he found his footing and ran out the door. It might have been another 20 years before she saw him again.)

 

“Vlad, Vlad, let me see” His hands are still cupping his face, but it's with no small alarm that she notices his hands are covered in burns already blistered. They glow with and eerie light, hands swollen to nearly twice their normal size. It takes two tries to pry them away from their tense position, two tries as Vlad moans and thrashes and tries to curl away.

 

It's hard. The skin around the blisters is bright and puffy, the liquid inside milky and visible, and she's afraid of grabbing his wrists and breaking them open.

 

“Vlad please.” This time her hands catch his lab coat, fingers threading into the sleeve so he can't tug away, and get his hands moved.

 

She gasps, and knows right then from the look in his eyes (glowing, they're glowing) it was the wrong move. He glances at his hands, at the raised boils on the back of them and sees the very second he comprehends what he must look like, when anger and embarrassment take hold.

 

And it's awful. The blisters on his hands looks small and sparse in comparison. Some of them on his face are as large as quarters, raised up and angry and painful looking in their dimensions. Some are so bunched together that they blend, forming large pockets of puss on his cheeks and nose and forehead. What isn't blistered is the tight, angry red of burns.

 

Through the horror, she see's the decision to run before he probably thinks it, and she holds him fast as he shuffles to his feet and tries to turn away. He's still glowing from the shoulders up. He still has enough raw ectoplasm on him to glow, it's probably still _burning him._

 

“Jack's already calling the hospital Vlad, we need to get that off you, now.” Jack calls it her Mom Voice, but thank god for it, because even as he leans away, pushing at her (“No Maddie, don't look please. Don't look at me.”) something must have ticked inside him at it, and his legs fallow all the way into the decontamination shower.

 

It's dumb, against procedure. He can walk on his own, which means that she should leave him to the shower, to avoid getting anything more on herself directly, but she's half afraid he'll bolt for the door.

 

(Vlad's not that stupid, he knows protocol as well as she does, but the wild look in his eyes when he looks at her.... she doesn't quite trust him right now.)

 

She gets the lab coat off of him, and is trying to figure out the logistics of getting his shirt off. She keeps one hand on him at all times, but even with two hands it's going to be hard getting the long sleeved Packers sweater over his head without shoving the filmy residue on his chest over his face and up his nose. Not without cooperation, which he seems to be lacking now. She grabs the nozzle to turn on the shower, hoping to wash as much as she can away while she figures it out.

 

“Wait a minute Mads.”

 

Thank god. She hadn't seen Jack walk back in. Normally, and she care's a great deal for Jack, but let's face it, she wouldn't want him touching an emergency situation like this with a twenty foot pole. But there's something to the determined set of his brow that sets the butterflies going and let's her know he's serious.

 

Even so, she's surprised when he walks up with a fist full of large ziplock bags. The first, he opens and shoves the still glowing lab coat from the bottom of the shower and seals it before tossing it on the closest lab table. Pride wells up in her when she realizes what he's doing, preserving the contaminate for later, just in case, and even more so when he does the same with Vlad's wallet, which she hadn't even given thought.

 

“I got him Maddie, go ahead.”

 

“Don't touch me!” Venom spills from Vlad's mouth, but the hard, worried line of Jack's brow doesn't change, even as he solves the shirt problem by grabbing the neckline and tearing it down the back, even as Maddie blasts the showers and Vlad wails when the water touches his skin, even as they quickly undress him, underwear and all, and soap him up as much as they can before the water can soften the boils to bursting.

 

They stand there in the cold shower for what seems like forever. Vlad grows weaker, quieter, until Jack is no longer holding him back but holding him up, until Maddie has to sit by his feet, looking up at Jack so as to not look at her friends nudity, and hold Vlad's feet open in the proper position. (seven minutes, seven from exposure to shower, had she gotten to him fast enough?) Their lips turn blue and they shiver, but they keep him there until the ambulance arrives, even longer as they realize the contamination (something Jack had neglected to mention in the call) and are forced to suit up before laying a shivering Vlad down on a gurney and taking him away.

 

She shucks her now useless mask and gloves and sits on a stool as they wait for another ambulance to arrive.

 

_----_

 

“I'm telling you he's got not other family.” It's the third time she's told a nurse this hour, and Maddie can feel the tension in her neck bleed into her temples. “His parents passed away about a year ago, there are no alternative numbers. I guess he forgot to file the paperwork to take them off his emergency contact list, but they aren't alive anymore.”

 

The nurse looks uncomfortable, like the last two before her, and she parrots out the same thing as the other two as well.

 

“Without a death certificate to prove it, and without Mr. Master's permission, we can't release any information on his status. But if you have any other number's we could call?...”

 

Maddie just lets out a frustrated groan.

 

“Then get his permission! We're his best friends, he's probably waiting on us!”

 

She want's to see how he's doing and get out. The day of the accident had been a long one. By all accounts, ectoplasm shouldn't burn like that, but it had hurt Vlad, and standing in the shower with Vlad had contaminated both of them as well. Decontaminated twice before being allowed into the second ambulance, they'd both been placed in quarantine for a week for observation. Jack is still in the back with finances, trying to sort his parent's insurance out so they could bust out of this joint.

 

They hadn't even seen each other that week, just nurses and her parents coming by every day to talk through the observation glass, her sister Alicia stopping by long enough for a smile and a wave.

 

And most frustrating of all, no word on Vlad.

 

“Hey Maddie, check out who I found!”

 

She hears the nurse scurry away when she turns, but Maddie doesn't even bother to stop her. This is much better.

 

Dr. Adam's had been attending to both she and Jack for the past week. They both like the man for various reasons. He's was one of the few doctors who'd hobbies aligned with their own, and Jack loved him because he listened and nodded with the attentiveness of someone who actually understood what Jack was talking about. Maddie liked him because he was good at what he did. Dad hadn't wanted her to be “doctored by that negro man” (and lord wasn't she embarrassed), but Maddie was impressed at how far he'd come, oppressed by both the color of his skin and his interests in ghosts.

 

It also helped, that he was more than willing to pass messages between her and Jack.

 

“On your way already?”

 

The doctor's voice is rich with amusement. He knew exactly how much she had been crawling up the walls the last few days.

 

“Dr. Adams, maybe you can help, they won't tell me anything about Vlad. Now that we're out we wanted to see him.”

 

“Yeah man, you guys are pretty tight lipped in this joint.”

 

The Doctor's smile immediately vanishes, and with it a small ball of doubtful worry forms in her stomach.

 

“Miss...” He ducks out from under Jack's arm and comes in close, voice lowered. “Now, you know we aren't allowed to release information outside the immediate family,” And he raises a hand to cut off both their protests. “But, if you call my extension, here's the number now, call my extension, I'll have my secretary try to set up the paperwork for you ok?” Dr. Adam glances away, just a little, the gears in his head visibly turning. Scratching at the graying hair on the back of his neck, he seems to come to a decision before looking her right in the eyes. “You need to call my extension before you call the ICU for visitation, since they'll need paperwork from us. It should only take them a couple of hours after that to work things out.”

 

“ICU!”

 

“Jack, it's alright, we'll come back. Thank you doctor.”

 

She does understand. He shouldn't have told them that and she's grateful. But that marble of worry is now a stone and she almost wishes he hadn't.

 

Dragging Jack out of the hospital, they take a cab to the closest pizza parlor. Jack eats his own share and hers as well, too worried to do more than nibble at the edges of a slice. Bribing the waitress, she gets ten minutes on the phone, calling Dr. Adam's secretary before the drink's even come.

 

“No problem sweetheart,” The woman on the other line pops her gum. “Bureaucracy’s a mess anyways. As long as I put the right inquiries for paperwork in they typically don't care that much, long as it gets done in the long run. Give me an hour or so, then you can stall calling visitation ok?”

 

They take another cab back to the hospital, and they make a round or two through the hospital's tiny park before she realizes that Jack hasn't stopped talking to take a breath, he's just stopped talking.

 

“Jack?” She reaches out to touch him, and when her hands find one of his massive ones, his grip is almost crushing.

 

“He's in the ICU Mads, it's been a week and he's hurt that bad...”

 

They hadn't talked about it. From the moment they'd taken Vlad away in the ambulance they hadn't acknowledge it, not really. Hospital food, catching up on classes, bad tv, whether they should sneak into the morgue to see if it was haunted, anything and everything but what had happened.

 

“He'll be fine Jack, you'll see.” She can't think of anything else to say.

 

(In another life, Vlad might have made it out the door. Jack would wait in the dorm room, only to come back from classes to a university worker cleaning out Vlad's half. Jack's got no one to call, and when he finds out where Vlad is, no one answers in his room, no one lets him through the door, so he stops trying. He never really finds out how bad it was. In another life, six months after the accident, they go dancing and Jack proposes in a fit of excitement. She kisses him and says yes, and they never talk about it.)

 

_----_

 

“The lights seem to bother him, so we keep them down. Let us know if you need us to turn them up more ok?”

 

And with that last bit of instructions, she and Jack are left in their papery gowns and covered faces to see him.

 

He looks awful. And the closer she gets the worse he looks.

 

The tight, burned red of his skin is gone, but in it's place is the shiny, wrinkled texture of a sunburn yet to peel. Many of the boils have been lanced and bandaged on his hands, but the one's on his face seemed to have settled some. It's terrible in it's own way, hardly better. Before the blisters had set on top of his skin, wide and raised and milky. Most have popped, leaving craters all over his face, the rims of them glowing damply. Those that haven’t are smaller, but _deep_ , and she itches with sympathy. In the dark of the room they shine like fireflies crawling under his skin.

 

It's spreading. Dr. Adams had told them so, that he was confined here until they were sure that it wouldn't go down his throat, wouldn't grow on his heart and close off his lungs, but she hadn't really expected to see the pinpoints of light creeping up his arms, where just a week before it had stopped at his wrists. She had assumed it was like a chemical burn when she'd seen it. Clean if off and he could heal in time. Looking at the small fuzzy patches of glowing skin on his upper arms, spots where the cysts hadn't swollen to skin level yet, she can see that it's more like a sickness. He's sweating and putting off heat that she can feel from his bedside, body fighting off more than one kind of infection.

 

What have they done?

 

“This is all my fault isn't it?”

 

Caught up in looking at Vlad, she hadn't even seen Jack sneak to the other side of the bed, hadn't seen in time to stop him from cupping one bandaged hand in his own large fists. (They were so totally getting kicked out.)

 

“Jack, Jack no-”

 

“Maddie, look at him!”

 

“Can't anyone ever let me sleep?” the voice is small. It's hardly a voice at all, more a sigh put through the mouth motions than an attempt to use vocal chords, but it's there.

 

Vlad's eyes crack open, and Maddie can't stop the small cry, a tiny “oh” from her lips. There's no pupils, just solid, vibrantly glowing red where ectoplasm has irritated the membranes of his eyes. He doesn't turn his head toward either of them, doesn't open his eyes more than a crack, and she has the terrifying thought that he might be blind.

 

“V-Man!”

 

“Jack quiet!” She has to hiss it through her teeth, and even so Vlad shakes his head with a frustrated groan. Jack does cut off though, and Vlad settles again. Even that much obviously exhausts him, leaves him shaking and wheezing from behind an oxygen mask. She and Jack sit there in the quiet, unwilling to disturb Vlad further, unable to think of anything else to do. Finally, Vlad seems to catch his breath. He turns towards her, eyes cracking open again. They're unsettling, but Maddie is relieved anyways, to see signs that he wasn't blinded after all.

 

“Maddie.”

 

Its an awful infection risk, but Jack's already breached that barrier. So rather than do the smart thing, she slips one of her hands under his, careful not to put pressure on it and hurt him. It seems to take all his effort, but the smile he gives her too is a relief.

 

“We're here Vlad, it's going to be ok, just focus on getting better, alright?”

 

Vlad's brow pinches, and if he's got the energy to be annoyed at Jack's loud tone, then he can't be that bad off. Reaching across him, she pats the top of Jack's hand, where he's still cupping Vlad's. Vlad seems to have only just noticed Jack on his other side. Rather than smooth the wrinkle between his brow and irritate his sores, she distracts herself by picking the small locks of hair (and it's white, she hadn't even noticed until just now, but it's been bleached bright by the extoplasmic flair) out of his face.

 

“That's right Vlad, we've got this.”

 

(They get kicked out after all, when a nurse comes in and sees them touching him. They give the nurses a few days to cool off. Maddie talks to Vlad's professors, his financial adviser, trying to put things on hold for a semester. Jack surprises her when he shows up with a duffel bag from their dorm room, appropriately packed with soft bedclothes and underwear and a few favored books, “For when he gets out.” He says.)

 

_----_

 

“It's my fault he's like this Maddie, he's dying and it's all my fault, I shoulda looked out for where he was, I shouldn't have even pushed those buttons, I'm sorry, I'm so sorry Mads...”

 

She shushes him, tries to sooth him even as he hunches down, picks her up and cuddles her like a comfort toy, hot breath and tears leaving her neck damp.

 

She kisses him, because she loves him and can't think of the words to convince him he's wrong.

 

“I can't do this alone Maddie, please, please...”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Inspiration for this chapter
> 
> http://ghost-chicky.tumblr.com/image/143757588297
> 
> Dr. Adams is an actual character in Chicky's AU, more info on him and his inevitable role here. (spoilers)
> 
> http://ghost-chicky.tumblr.com/post/63193198247/hello-there-chicky-i-was-thinking-about-family


	2. The During: 02

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Vlad does not have a good time in the hospital.

“It's his fault I'm like this.”

 

He hadn't meant to snap at her. Maddie has been so kind, so giving in his time of need. She'd been there when he'd been wracked with agony, when every light felt like a spike through his eyes, when the spaces between his joints creaked and ached like rusted hinges. She'd been there when every touch had brought new stings of pain and sloughed off dead skin and he looked like some B rate horror monster. She'd been there when he was terrified, waking from procedures he couldn't remember agreeing to, head swimming with medications and flesh cut from his body. She'd been there with paperwork then, and she'd occasionally wake him from what little sleep he could get, explaining what was happening, what they were telling her, and he doesn't regret for a second giving her command.

 

He does regret snapping at her.

 

Then her eyes dart to the door that Jack had disappeared from. Vlad is restricted to ice and an IV, but now that he's out of immediate danger Jack and Maddie spend more time in his hospital room than their dorms, studying and trying to catch him up in the classes they share, writing letters to the professors he has alone. His major in statistics or the looming end and his integrated science-buisness program mean nothing if he doesn't graduate after all. But while they bring food on college credit from the campus restaurants, drink runs to the cafeteria or a nearby coffee dispenser happen quite often.

 

Jack's got another ten minutes, _at least,_ and even now, she thinks of him, cares for him more than Vlad, and he hates for it _._

 

“Vlad-”

 

“No Maddie, look at me, look at what he did.”

 

He tugs at his hair, white like an old man's, even in the shadow of a beard that the nurses keep trimmed till he can shave again. Throws up his hands, covered in scabs and glowing pink scars and small, deep pock marks still filled with florescent puss. Every patch of clear skin is hard won at the cost of blisters forming somewhere else. His eyes are back to normal, but his light sensitivity is not.

 

“What he did? What about you, standing in front of it when it was plugged in? What about me, who took to long to get you in the shower? What about all of us, with Jack the only one running around in anything like protective equipment in a room full of chemicals? It could have been any of us Vlad!”

 

“But it wasn't!” He snarls, and how dare she, how _dare_ she try to protect Jack in this. “I was right there and he didn't even check, didn't even look, he could have killed me Maddie, because of his stupidity!”

 

“You think he doesn't know that!” and she's right in his face, close enough to kiss. “You think he doesn't look at you and see how much he messed up. Vlad.” And for half a breath, he thinks she's going to do it, going to kiss him like he's been dreaming for the last year and change. Then he looks into eyes and sees what's really there. The hard, flat intensity of her serious desperation, the pain of her empathy. “Vlad, please, don't hate him, he hates himself so much already.”

 

Jack comes through the door then, and Vlad want's to smirk, wants to snarl, wants to lean in and watch Jack come to some conclusion that wasn't quite there. But the big idiot just smiles at them, that pinched look in his brow that is anything but betrayal, and hands Maddie her coffee as she leans back slowly, no doubt heavy with enough sugar to frost a cake. Two absently made cups to his own standards rather than the touch of vanilla creamer Maddie truly prefers. But she drinks it anyways, wincing, and Vlad bites the snarl down and wipes at his eyes in a motion he hopes looks like pinching his brow. Because she's right and he hates that she's right and he hates and hates and hates.

 

“Hey now buddy.” He hates that Jack understands and the way he cries when one thick arm drapes over his shoulder, tipping him with just a bit of strength until his nose wedges into the warm crease between Jack's arm and chest and hates that what little comfort he has in this world can be found here. He hates that he hates and that its all he has left.

 

_----_

 

“Hey V-man, snuck you in an apple juice from a lunch cart, don't tell the nurses.”

 

Jack winks at him, like it's some big secret, when he knows Vlad's been on a liquid diet for two weeks now.

 

If Vlad has to eat one more popsicle he's going to scream.

 

He doesn't want Jack here, not when Maddie's in class, or cooped up in the library sourcing her papers. It's harder when it's just Jack. When Maddie's here, he can cast all his attention on her, forget the loaf is even in the room for a while and watch the way her forehead wrinkles when she copies notes, or how she drinks through a straw when she's wearing lipstick, or the way her hair curls in the sunlight next to his window.

 

When it's just Jack, he can't ignore the man or the way Vlad can't seem to understand him.

 

Jack's too attentive. Carrying Vlad to the bathroom those first weeks so he wouldn't piss the bed and embarrass himself, bringing him his favorite cloths without being asked when he'd been cleared for underwear and pants, checking the sports channels in the papers so Vlad would know when a game was on.

 

Little things to Maddie's big responsibilities, like bringing him an apple juice just when Vlad gets thirsty.

 

Which doesn't make sense. Something's changed between Jack and Maddie, more and more apparently the better he feels, the more he can look. There's a softness between them that wasn't there before, and he dreads the answer just as certainly as he knows it's true. Jack's made his move, left Vlad in the dust, and by all means he should be whisking Maddie away as far and fast as possible. It's what Vlad would do.

 

It's not a hard stretch, that string of betrayal, that Jack would _use_ his pain in such a way. But when they're alone, his eyes are only on Vlad, _for_ Vlad, and when Vlad is forced to look back he can't deny that there isn't a devious bone in Jack's body, that if anything has progressed between Jack and Maddie it's because Jack cares more for her, not less for him. Betrayal would be easy. Betrayal would be an excuse. This is real life and he's being left behind and it's hard.

 

“Thank you Jack.” and he means it, because without Maddie there to remind him, it means Jack saw it and thought of Vlad's needs, and for all that he's a grown adult there aren't a lot of people in Vlad's life who do that anymore.

 

He reaches out to take the carton, and for one brief moment he's sure that Jack has been clumsier than usual and poured the whole thing on his hand, which has suddenly gone a shocking, liquid sort of chill even as the carton tumbles unopened to his lap.

 

There's a beat of incomprehension, Jack's shocked breath sucked through clenched teeth, and he looks at his hand, what he can see of his hand, as he tries again and again to pick up the juice, as the edges of his limb goes fuzzy and falls through his lap.

 

“Jack?” He's sinking. Sinking, sinking, sinking into the metal contraptions that raises and lowers his bed, and he has the sudden terrible vision of suddenly being whole and wrapped through the gears. “Jack, Jack, Jack oh my god, JACK!”

 

He's ripped from the bed, _through_ the blankets and thudding into Jack big, _solid_ chest, suddenly delineated by the heat of Jack's body. Jack's got him under his arms, and one of them is drooling blood where the IV had just flat out fallen out of his ill defined veins.

 

He's shaking, teeth chattering from pain meds, from sheer terror.

 

“Jack, jesus, Jack what was that? What the hell was that?”

 

It's not the first time he's cried in this mans arms, not by a long shot. Not even in the last month. He tucks himself into the hot muscles of the man's sheer mass, running from the constant aching cold in his bones he's felt since he'd woken in the hospital, moaning into his neck and _hating._

 

“I'm sorry Vlad, I'm so sorry, oh god what have I done? What have I done to you? Oh god, oh god I'm so sorry....”

 

_----_

 

Maddie is, understandably, skeptical.

 

“Jack, it's not theoretically possible, straight ectoplasm can't... it can't infect you like that Jack you can't be alive with a body and do that sort of thing.”

 

“I know that babycakes, but if you'd seen it...”

 

Vlad blocks them out and concentrates on his right hand, the one that went intangible before. It would probably be easier with it, and it's also not the arm that holds his new IV (the right one looks nasty, the bruise from the blown out vein large and so purple it's nearly black.) He has to hurry. The nurses think that he fell and check in on him every five minutes now, per the rules, but he has to know he's not crazy, she _has got_ to see this.

 

He's been imagining his hand the way it was before, staring at it, trying to determine if the edges had fallen away, like someone had taken an eraser to his outline, but that hadn't worked so far.

 

This time, instead, he imagines that moment of sensation, the almost wet cold that had poured down his fingertips and through his body. He blows on them gently, trying to mimic the chill, and that does it. His fingertips fade, the color slowly desaturating to his wrist, up his arm, and he quickly grabs the space above the creeping blurring line, rubbing furiously, heating it until it slows to a stop.

 

“Maddie, Maddie look.” He hisses, and when she does it's with a gasp of alarm. His whole hand, his arm up to his elbow, is gone, the just the faintest shimmer of bluegrey the only indication of where it once was, like fog taken shape.

 

“Jack, we need to get him out of here.”

 

“Out? Maddie I've been here months and I'm still having flairs regularly!” It's true. He's not sure who coined the term “Ecto Acne” but as much as Vlad hates that it makes him sound like a greasy teenager it's appropriate. After the initial burns had faded, he's been left with these deep boils where his body fights the ectoplasm, working it to the surface and bleeding out his pores, which then leave infections on his skin in the form of glowing pimples. In theory, it should become less common the more ectoplasm gets washed away. In practice he has no idea where it's all coming from, and the longest he's gone without a new sore or pimple has been about five days. Cutting them out just makes them grow back bigger. Lancing them, no matter how carefully it's done or meticulously he's cleaned, makes them spread. So for now they play the waiting game. Two weeks, Dr Adam's says, and he can go home and live with the result, with periodic checkups to check his mucus membranes for any sign of internal infection.

 

He's healed fairly well the last day or so, and he's due for another flair soon. Not even close to two weeks, and Adams will cuff him to the bed to keep him here if he must.

 

“We can't just leave you here for them to cut open, you can't keep this a secret if you're doing it on accident!”

 

Jack doesn't cut in so much as butt in his whole body. He'd been leaning against a door frame until just a second ago. But while he's large, Jack is _fast,_ and his hulking mass is already blocking Vlad's still invisible hand just half a beat before the nurse taps the door and comes in before they can respond.

 

Jack grabs the spot where flesh sort of just disappears up Vlad's arm and cups his hand around it, the other one clenching around where Vlad's hand would be if it was tangible. Vlad has that jolt of awareness he occasionally gets, of just how enormous Jack really is, the very definition of big boned. He got his fingers wrapped around Vlad, covering nearly to the elbow, and instead of awkward he just looks like the caring loved one holding his hand. Despite standing right next to them, the nurse doesn't notice. She looks him right in the eyes as she asks the same question hes been asked every two hours for the last few months, check's his IV and tells him her shift is ending at six and she'll introduce his night nurse in another two hours. There's a collective sigh of relief when she leaves, and an even bigger one when Jack let's go and his hand is back.

 

_----_

 

They manage, somehow.

 

They request a pull in bed, so that someone can always be with Vlad through the night. Jack sleeps on it while Maddie cuddles into Vlad's side in his hospital bed. He knows it's so she'll know if he starts sinking through it, so that if bits of him disappear it still looks like he's got all his limbs under the blankets at a passing glance. Even so he can't stop himself from curling an arm around her and tucking his face into her hair.

 

Jack holds his elbows while Vlad walks, to weak from fighting the ectoplasm and skin infections to go far, to keyed up on whatever energy makes this possible to hold still. Jack keeps the nurses at bay when Vlad starts phasing his IV out or through the floors (Clumsy, they call him, and he's not, but he feels like it) Occasionally, Jack has to take a bullet and gets kicked out, pretends to have snuck him cigarettes when he shivers and his breath comes out like vapor.

 

They feed him when his hands refuse to hold cutlery, claim he's gone to the restroom and bar the door when he goes invisible and the nurses can't find him. They talk for hours on theory, whats happening to him and how to help, ghost proof sheets so he can sleep, ghost proof clothes he can't phase out of (which he has done), ghost proof this and that and they don't actually use the word ghost, too scared of what that means for him, but it doesn't matter much, because they're just college kids with no resources and they don't have more than theory anyways.

 

Jack brings him his shaving kit, for the time's when his face is healed enough, and takes a blade to his throat when Vlad's hands shake. Maddie trims his hair in the shower stall in his bathroom, braids it because the short cropped hair on top of his head is long enough to comb into it and he's not allowed styling products, and even when he wakes up in the middle of the night and scares the heck out of everyone with glowing red eyes he starts to feel human again.

 

It's... it's a little thrilling, to be honest, having this huge, terrifying secret.

 

At one point Maddie closes the door behind a nurse with a frustrated sigh and smiles at them. Jack catches his eye from the foot of the bed, where he's got his hands wrapped around Vlad's ankles, trying to rub sensation and color back into his invisible feet, and winks at him.

 

A hysteric giggle bursts out. He's not sure who starts it, but before long the whole room is filled with laughter, and something settles in Vlad.

 

It's a dark, hungry thing. For a long while Vlad thought it was for Jack alone, this burning energy within him, this intense emotion that's anything but kind, that goes past resentment and further and further until he's not sure he can even call it hate anymore. It's greedy and cruel and claws it's way to the surface when he dreams. It's still there, half mad and wild, but like a tamed creature it sleeps, soothed by their presence. It's not less than anything it was before, but it doesn't snap and draw blood every time Jack opens his mouth, every time Maddie leans in close and cups Jack's cheek, every time they share a kiss outside Vlad's door when they think he's not looking.

 

It's been hard on them. Classes have been shifted around, some dropped to accommodate the travel time from the hospital to the college campus. Their dorm rooms have become little more than storage and they see little of their other, sparse friends, who have come a few times to see Vlad, only to be sent running at his snapping temper. Maddie has run herself ragged as the go between for Vlad and his career advisers, moving things around, trying to buy him time and catch him up, and Jack's grades are suffering from picking up the slack.

 

It's hard and Vlad knows he should feel guilty, but that hot beast within him claws anything like that to pieces and chews on the concept contently like a large bone.

 

Good, he thinks, it means they care. He's grateful, but he's not going to tell them to stop.

 

_----_

 

Vlad's a year in the hospital and two and a half week's without a flare up, filling out discharge papers and stubbornly waiting till noon to dress so he can have lunch, when it suddenly gets much worse.

 

He's alone in his room, Maddie chatting outside the door, Jack changing the sheets in their dorm room (Jack has, quite stubbornly, kept his side open, and Vlad's glad he'll have a place to sleep tonight) when he starts to salivate.

 

A lot.

 

He swallows, chokes on it, and gasps as liquid fills the back of his throat and the breath that goes down is _cold._ He gets out two, freezing breaths before it really hits him. Not quite nausea, but his stomach is suddenly _full_ and brights glowing sludge flows from his mouth faster than he can swallow.

 

It looks like it should taste awful, but it's just cold. Its bright green and so thick it's almost hard, strings of it catching in his nose and throat and the chill of the ectoplasm chokes him even as he pounds on the call button.


	3. The During: 03

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My apologies. This chapter was done in advance, but I was spirited away to my sister's house to work on Halloween costumes and was left with no means to upload it on Wednesday. Schedule is still tentatively the same.

Another week in the ICU.

 

The common theory is that he'd had a flair in the lining of his stomach that had burst suddenly because he'd eaten something, or bent wrong or any other reason than “just because”. Maddie has, thankfully, been listed as his Power of Attorney in health care, something she pushed for as soon as Vlad could hold a pen, something he'd been surprisingly complacent in.

 

She refuses a Gastroscopy on his behalf, wanting to spare him the discomfort when she has her own theories.

 

Ones that are proving more right by the moment.

 

Dr. Adams has been brought back in to analyze the goop, and when he steps out, Maddie gives him a nod in acknowledgment before sliding in. She doesn't worry to much about infection. Vlad did get them, occasionally, just as painful at the ghostly one's peppering his skin, but in the last nine or so months she's got a lot better at sanitizing herself. She turns off the light, and there's a sense of Deja vu as she slides on a pair of nicked gloves and a mask.

 

She just.... has to see.

 

As far as she can tell, she's right. Watching him be spirited away earlier, the veritable pile of chunks and clots of ghostly essence filling his lap, there was far more than there should have been, _could have been_ , if he was just working out what had been shot into his system by the ecto energy flare.

 

His nose is runny, not with snot, but with the faintly glowing remains of his purge. Little feathery cobwebs slowly being spun by his breath. The corners of his mouth around the breathing apparatus are slick with it too, and that can all be blamed on the incident earlier.

 

But not his eyes.

 

With a tissue she dabs at the corners of them, wiping away the ectoplasm that's crusting them shut, and the green glows on the tissue even as his eyes give off a faint red tinge.

 

He's making it. He producing it faster than his body could work it out and it's terrifying.

 

It means something, but it also _means_ something, and Maddie isn't sure what either of those things are. So she kisses his sweaty brow, hoping that he's at least conscious enough to feel some comfort from it, and leaves.

 

_----_

 

They shuffle him right back out of the ICU with the air of a team well used to his theatrics.

 

As soon as the flood is gone and he can breath again they pull out the tube in his throat and he's back in his old room for another weeks “observation” as they call it. There's an air of irritation about them, in that as soon as he could speak again he refused their exploratory procedures, but there’s nothing they can do without permission.

 

But they still hound him like the dickens, and as much as he likes Dr. Adam's, Vlad is not ready to speak to him right now.

 

It is, with no small relief, that Jack and Maddie come through the door from their lunch run, chuckling among themselves in some inside joke, just moments before Dr Adams is due. Vlad isn't sure he can handle anything else.

 

“Guys, guy, _help_.”

 

Their eyes go to the bed, around the room, before the voice really registers.

 

The look up, up, up at him and stare, wheels in their head grinding in twin looks of confusion before the panic sets in.

 

“Goodness Vlad!”

 

“Holy smoke's V-Man! You can fly!”

 

“Yes well I'd rather not be right now Jack, get me down!”

 

He's been up here for nearly half an hour, having woken hovering gently above his bed. Every movement after that had only worked to propel him higher and higher until he was tight pressed against the ceiling. He tries to kick off from the ceiling panels, and only manages to kick a hole through one of them. Reaching as far as he can only manages to brush against Jack's up reached finger.

 

“Wait, wait, I got this, up you go!”

 

With very little warning, he's got Maddie hoisted by the waist and sitting on his shoulder. She squeals a little, but immediately sets back to grasping at Vlad's arms, much to his relief.

 

It's less of a relief when Jack starts to slide her to the floor, only for Vlad not to fallow. She dangles from his arms, and while he sinks a inch or so, he gets no closer than that to the ground. Jack grabs her around her hips once more, set to add his own weight to the equation, when Adams arrives, right on schedule.

 

Vlad is aware of Jack's blathering, Maddie's hysterical laughter, but the rising tide of panic finally washes over him when he sees the wide eyes look the older gentleman is giving them.

 

He hiccups, tries to breath but can't.

 

Gravity decided then that it's done with his contrary behavior and tugs at him once more.

 

He falls.

 

_----_

 

Things are suddenly fast after that.

 

He'd had no idea of Maddie's suspicions until then, but the longer she talks the more sense it makes.

 

He's been changed, not just physical scars but fundamentally, in ways they have yet to really comprehend.

 

“It make's sense doctor, I've been testing the residue on his clothes, and it's not pure ectoplasm like we thought. Pure ectoplasm wouldn't have hurt him like that. It was tainted with something.”

 

Vlad often forgets that despite his playfulness and daydreams Jack is actually an intelligent man, and the look on his face during that confession is of a scientist thwarted at every turn.

  
Anger rises in him, because how long has Jack known this? How long has has he kept this from both of them? He has no doubts that Maddie is innocent in this deception, from the wrinkle in her brow when she looks at Jack. But why would Jack do this to him? If he's been having bad reactions to the contaminate, not the ectoplasm, then they needed to isolate it! The ectoplasm could have been tainted a million ways yes, at any point in the equipment's handling, but surely if they'd passed around the chemical compound amongst themselves, even shared with the doctor, something could have been done by now!

 

But as if sensing it, as he always does, Jack turns to him and sets a searing hot hand on his thigh, patting it lightly with a heart full of determination in his eyes.

 

“I'll figure it out Vladdie, I'll _fix this_.”

 

And just like that the thing clawing and catching inside of him looses purchase and the crackling, roiling energy settles back into his bones. As often as Vlad forgets Jack is an intelligent man, he often remembers that Jack is a man ruled by his emotions. It's so hard to hate Jack's mistakes when feels them even more keenly than anyone else, when he sometimes doesn't even know they're there at all.

 

Vlad doesn't want to hate him anyways. It's exhausting.

 

_----_

 

He's out of the hospital at the end of the week, no fuss, no muss, and one last check up from the good Dr Adams.

 

It's unorthodox, most Doctors hand the nurse a few printouts of aftercare and talk little with the patient once their specialty is no longer needed. But with Vlad it seems to be the opposite. Adams had sent the nurse out instead, checked his blood pressure one last time, looks over the bruises blooming across Vlad’s arms, and hands, and thighs where he's blown out countless IV's, and flashes a beam into his eyes in a way that seems more habit than anything, given that Vlad's vision had suffered no long term effects even with the occasional red flashes.

 

Adams sets back on his heels, sucks in a breath, and sighs.

 

“Now, as far as the medical boards and government are aware, you're flushing the toxins out nicely and should be back to normal completely within a couple of years...” and Vlad nods, because that's what was agreed on. “But I want you in for private checkups, once a week at least until further notice.”

 

And there it is. He wasn't sure why Adams hadn't thrown him face first into case studies the first chance he had, but this must be it. First crack at the freak, gathering information before anyone else gets a chance. Labrat, labrat, labrat, whispers his suspicions. People like him, and Jack, and Maddie, people with their interests aren't kind in their scientific inquiries. He trusts Jack and Maddie, he doesn't have much of a choice, but he doesn't trust this man with this secret as far as he could throw him.

 

Vlad sneers, but Phillip Adams hadn't gotten this far in his career backing down from ornery patients, and only raises a questioning brow in return.

 

“And how long, pray tell good doctor, will that goodwill last before you throw me to the dogs?”

 

That does get a response. Not surprise, but something a little warm and sad.

 

“Mr. Masters....” and he reaches out as if to pat Vlad's shoulder before thinking better of it. “Vlad. I won't force you to come. I won't threaten you. But I am a doctor. It's my job to help people, and right now I might be the only doctor available to you who could help you if you need it. And I can't help you when something goes wrong if I don't know what's happening inside of you when things are going right.”

 

(In another life, Vlad might have spent those first weeks in the ICU alone and scared. He might have bitten and snapped until the doctors wanted little to do with him. When Dr. Adams inevitably finds out about his powers, Vlad has forced the practice and focus needed to wander the grounds invisible and pick pockets, trying to fill his own empty wallet, scared because when they kick him out he's got no where to go. He spends years in that hospital, with a bed and food and buying silence from the the doctors who suddenly find themselves a hundred dollar bill short. Doctor Adams tries, but Vlad is as cruel and frightening as his illness is fascinating, and it's easier to study the case from afar.)

 

He leaves Vlad with that thought, and an hour later, Vlad leaves the hospital.

 

(His wallet sits on his bedside table when he gets back to the dorm rooms. He'd thought it destroyed with his clothing, but its all there. It's been shuffled through, ID and social security card slipped into the wide bill pocket, no doubt by Maddie filling out his paperwork. But it's all there, even the picture of his parents he carries around and the money he'd saved up to take Maddie out on a date before the accident.)

 


	4. The After: 04

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Normality returns (where it hadn't before)

Vlad's still sick, still gets the occasional flair up and fevers, still wary of stairs and open spaces that he can fall through, and wears gloves in case his hands disappear. But a year in the hospital is more than enough for him, and he's got three weeks left of college that he can wile away. Three weeks of class scheduling and financial advisers and trying to talk professors into anything he can do for that passing grade, the odd desperate credit.

 

He visits the Doctor anyways, and the appointments are almost disappointingly mundane. Weight and height and heartbeat. The wildest they've gotten is an x-ray scheduled in a couple of days.

 

He doesn't go to any of the parties exploding on campus. He can't drink, Jack and Maddie would kill him, let alone his doctor, and he was never to fond of his classmates much anyways. Maddie does hand him a pair of cotton gloves to cover a new set of blisters, one day when his face is clear, and he's surprised to find his dorm room spotted with a few old science partners, some of Maddie's gal pals.

 

They rag at him, tell him he looks like shit. (And he does. He was never an athletic man but his clothes fairly hang off him now, and he gets tired easily. There are little pink scars on his face where they lanced and cut sores from his flesh. His hair is so white it's nearly translucent and to long everywhere for the current trend) They thump him in the back, pass around warm beer and cold soda and their thesis theories like gossip. Music plays, the lights dim, and someone even starts a juvenile game of spin the bottle which Vlad stubbornly steps out of when people starts chanting “Backwash!”.

 

He actually has fun.

 

He's also stressed beyond belief.

 

In three weeks, he'll be homeless until the summer ends, his childhood home having gone back to the bank when his parents died. His original plan had been to get a winter job and save up for an apartment, but it's to late for that. He also has trouble sleeping, because whatever this is that's inside him has him clamping at the bit, and he starts jogging, trying to burn the energy off any way he can. It doesn't help like it should, exhaustion and lightning singing in his veins, but it makes his bed look that much more comforting.

 

Unfortunately, it's also a huge temptation, and Vlad feeds himself on pocketed twenties and a rush that washes away the guilt. Fingering through his gradually growing wallet helps with the stress better than anything else he's found.

 

Jack, reliable Jack, fixes it of course.

 

(In another life, none of this would matter. Vlad is alone and stuck, trying to bribe his way to a cure in a hospital bed. Jack and Maddie get married during Spring Break, not even a year into their engagement, too excited to wait. Maddie's sister gives them a sizable chunk of cash for their wedding present, crumpled bills shoved under a floorboard for such occasion, and they rent a little one bedroom apartment until they discover that the sealant they’d made to keep out ghosts is also a fantastic insulator, and the patent on it tips them over into the green for Fenton Works.)

 

Maddie's taken a secretarial job at a local taekwondo dojo in a strip mall downtown. It's easy math and she can earn a little under the table leading the young girls class when the Sensei can't be bothered. She's coming back in the summer, going for her Masters degree.

 

“I'm done.” Jack says, when Maddie asks him. They're at a downtown Burger joint and Vlad's frowning at his fries, unsure if he's willing to splurge on a milkshake for desert and having to go out again for more cash. “I've learned what I wanted to from them. If I want to learn anything else I'll do it on my own.”

 

That's _dumb_ because a Bachelors in Design and Engineering is all well and good if you want to be an inventor, but not so good for a nine to five sort of situation. The smart thing to do would be to go for his Masters, build his credentials, let school deal with his living expenses for a while until he gets the scholarships to bust out some prototypes and live off the government money and patents. But Jack just laughs.

 

“Nah V-man, government isn't to worried about ghost weapons at the moment. Either I come up with something in my own time or I won't. I have a job till then anyways.”

 

Jack throws a wad of cash on the table and Vlad's mind stutters. Too much for a couple of weeks work, but not very much by a year's standards.

 

Construction work, just digging holes and hammering nails, enough to put a tan on Jack's back if he ever took off that damn mail order Hazmat suit; enough to put muscle across his shoulders and arms and a deposit on something with a working toilet and kitchen. Vlad can't even think of how he might have had the time, through his time in the hospital and commuting and school.

 

He throws a fry at Jack's smug face because he shouldn't be proud, he should be ashamed. Menial labor is to far below Jack's questionable intellect, even if he's built like a damn brick house for it.

 

Jack just catches the fry in his mouth, quick as he is clumsy, and another, and another, until Vlad is laughing and throwing fistfuls at his face, and Maddie knocks over her drink tossing them back.

 

“Come on Vlad, I'm gonna be lonely not listening to your snoring, wanna give it a go?”

 

“My snoring!”

 

He dumps his milkshake on Jack's awful head, and Vlad's mind just boggles at it. How long had Jack been working like that? Not to escape, but to open up a door for Vlad, give him something to come home to? It's as surprising as it is touching, and after they're done laughing and wiping down their table under the manager's frowning stare they walk out full of giggles, talking about apartments, each idea more grand and idealistic than the next.

 

“- and a great big safe room in the top, that can turn into a blimp for fast ghost escapes!”

 

Vlad guffaws at the visual of it, and it's easy to reach up and loop his arm around Jack's neck, a hard squeeze to his side in the manliest of half hugs.

 

“Thank you Jack.” and those words are easy too.

 

Jack catches Vlad before he can pull away, twist him around until he's got his chin tucked up on Jack's shoulder. He can feel Jack's muscles shift as he hooks Maddie by that delectable, trim waist and pulls her in too, boxes Vlad in on both sides with living heat.

 

So Vlad just... lets him. One arm around Maddie, another over Jack's shoulder, he tucks his nose into a collar bone that still sticky with milkshake and smells of warm vanilla and milk and just exists for a minute.

 

_----_

 

It takes a little longer than they hoped to find appropriate housing. Anything close enough to campus tends to be student apartments. They don't want to rent to Jack, who won't be attending, and anyone who's willing to give anything to Vlad without proof of income wants to rent to only Vlad.

 

Maddie throws out, unashamed, that she'll probably start living with them anyways, and cosigns a two bedroom apartment with no air conditioner or microwave on the East side. The carpet needs steam cleaned, the corners have cobwebs, and there's a crack in the wall just above the door. But the walls are freshly painted and it doesn't stink too bad, and it's already furnished with two beds, a table, a couple of chairs. No T.V., but that's what sports bars are for.

 

She and Jack take the Master, not because they particularly want it, but because the only other bed is a twin. Vlad does get a bit of mileage joking about how his name was on the room to start with and should by right be his.

 

It's ok. Sharing one bathroom, he expects the space to be taken over by frilly soaps and lace from Maddie, but she takes only a little more room than Jack. Same shampoos and soaps, just in a different scent. It's actually kinda funny, when half the medicine cabinet hold all kinds of makeup, a few large bottles of aerosol hair spray and curl oils on the back of the toilet, while the rest is full of every expensive lotion and cream Vlad can get his hands on, trying to get the scars on his face to fade.

 

Jack and Maddie do eat up space in their little kitchen, saccharine and putting out truly abysmal meals until Vlad kicks them both out for want of something edible, and he sort of just never leaves. Jack tosses him some cash now and again for groceries or Maddie comes home with paper bags; it reminds him that he's the only one without a job and he picks pockets just to contribute, even if there's enough food in the cabinets.

 

He's almost always tired. Dr Adam's told him he'd probably be tired for possibly months still, especially when he flairs, but he still feels like he should get something for a job, even if it's for the summer.

 

Maddie clucks her tongue and continues to comb Vlad's hair back from his face into a ponytail. Jack just shakes his head and pushes the old textbook Vlad had in front of him closer.

 

“We got you Vlad, you focus on catching up, that's your job right now.”

 

He feels a little less like a used rag when he works out, trying to burn the rolling liquid energy inside his chest. It's not something he's ever done much in his life before, and it's a hard routine to start, harder to keep, but something about it helps. Lifting weights in the apartment complex's tiny “exercise room” burns off inevitable anger that comes from cohabiting. Crunches on the living room floor sparks his appetite for the first time in a long while. He's read his textbooks a hundred times over, hoping to test out of some credits the new semester, but its a bit more interesting if he's doing push up while reading. Jogging at 3 am is a great was to kill some time and turn off his thoughts when the headboard in the Master bedroom starts hitting a wall.

 

The lack of air conditioner is a bad decision for his routine though. For three weeks over the summer it hits 90 and above in their ill equip little Wisconsin town.

 

If he told his past self from a year ago that he'd be living with Maddie, watching her sweat in an oversized wifebeater with arm holes wide enough that her breasts peak out the side and a pair of panties, he probably would have swooned with joy.

 

As it is, it's just way. to. hot. Just looking at her and Jack lounge in their underwear makes a tingle run up his thighs, but no further interest comes. Maddie looks up when he leaves the bathroom, and stares at him a moment.

 

Confused, Vlad crosses his arms over his chest, very aware that he too is only in a pair of boxer-briefs. He knows it's bad. The hair on his chest are going more salt than pepper for some reason he can't fathom, even though they weren’t hit in the accident. He's got pock marks like freckles all the way up his arms and across his chest. But while Vlad has always been a weedy, willowy man, puberty seems to have hit him twice, because to more he works out, the more muscle he seems to put on across the shoulders. He's still not fit, by any means, but a good couple of months of hard daily work has made him look less like the gremlin he was in the hospital and more like a anatomically correct human being.

 

He is proud of his abs though... ab, he's got one, but it's all muscle.

 

“Jack.”

 

He's never heard Maddie whine before, with the nasally, childlike inflection that's half a question.

 

“I know Maddie.”

 

Jack pats her shoulder from where her head is tucked up next to his thigh, and when he starts to shift, Vlad scoffs.

 

“Absolutely not, do not carry her into the bath Jack, children need to learn independence.”

 

They both stare at him, share a look he can't decipher, and then crack into laughter that's probably uncomfortable in the heat.

 

A little embarrassed by the poor joke, he flops down into the couch at their feet. Fully aware he now runs a few degrees hotter, he leans over Maddie on purpose just to torture her to grab the carton of half melted ice cream in Jack's hand and takes one of the only two spoons they can find in this house with it. Maddie swats him on the chest, makes a big deal of how sweaty he is even though he just got out of the shower and both she and Jack are visibly shiny on their foreheads and upper lip. Jack just laughs and pats Vlad hard enough when he's leaned over that he's almost sure he meant to push Vlad down onto the poor woman.

 

Really it's just... normal.

 

He hadn't expected to be normal. Not anymore.

 

The weirdest parts of his day they spend together, figuring him out.

 

All together they walk him through these.... powers, abilities he's obtained on almost a daily basis. Testing to see what he can do on purpose, for how long, and after a while numbers start to go up from just practice. Jack shows up with a tether that glows that he swears he shouldn't be able to phase out of and try to get him to float again, but he can't seem to do it while awake. At one point he makes a wild gesture at dinner and red flashes across his vision. There's a burn mark on the wall, quietly smoldering, and the look his roommates give him is at once shock and fascination. (They don't own the apartment, but they figure they've lot their deposit after that, and Maddie takes no small glee in circling the burn mark with a sharpie, surrounding it in various question marks whenever she feels the urge. It becomes a bit of a thing with her.)

 

The most ridiculous thing in his life has been reduced to...to lists and charts and tests and repetition. And he should be insulted at becoming a bit of a lab rat, but Vlad is as much as scientist at they are, understands how important this is if he's going to function normally in the future.

 

It's almost normal now, and.... normal is good.

 


	5. The When and the Why: 05

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> ...and the How it starts for Jack and Maddie

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (Rating raised for a brief mention of sexual content in this chapter)

For Maddie it starts in the apartment.

 

She loves Jack. Capital L loves him. Going into college, she'd never met anyone half as enthused about ghosts as she was. Coming out of it she'd never met anyone half as enthused about ghosts as Jack was, and still is, herself included.

 

He's everything she lacks, a veritable fountain of creativity where her practicality sits, stoked for action where she has always faltered, carefree in her worry and steadfast and dependable in her flexibility. Every day it grows a bit, until eventually she looks at him and knows she wants to spend the rest of her life indulging that endless wonder.

 

Jack has his... moments... but she loves him because of them, not despite, and for her that's everything.

 

Loving Jack is sometimes work, but it's never hard.

 

On the other hand, she... cares a great deal for Vlad.

 

She's not as oblivious as she pretends. She's aware of Vlad's affections, and she hesitates to call it love, because love would give him a cruel false hope.

 

Before the accident it had been uncomfortable. She hadn't known him all that well, her eyes set only on Jack, and his advances at the time were too aggressive for comfort; Maddie is sensible, and she wanted Jack, and she was raised properly despite what people say. To entertain Vlad in any way was flirting with... well, flirting with anyone besides Jack.

 

After the accident, things were different. She'd gotten to know Vlad better in those months than she had in four years of experiment collaborations and dorm dates.

 

He's smart, but she already knew that, with a dry wit that is truly something to behold. When the pain had gotten bad he'd flinch and strain when awake, only to cry for comfort when asleep. He hated pain meds, because they made his head swim and his teeth chatter. When he was busy, or hurting to distraction enough that he forget to flirt with her he was a fascinating man to theorize with. The more time she spent with him in that tiny room, the more she realized that he's lonely, desperately so, and Maddie wants to cradle the small boy inside him aching for love and never let him go.

 

The hospital was part of it yes. The flashes of hypercompetence and aggressive posturing in Jack might make her knees wobble but it's his sweet reliance on her that makes her purr. It's a heady drug, being needed, and just as it was with Jack, Vlad is a slippery slope for Maddie. Cuddling Vlad at night to settle his nightmares, feeding him by hand, combing his hair, all the million little physical affections that seemed to sooth Vlad's soul and sand down the sharp edges until he became something that softly glowed in her attention. Maddie knew what that line looked like from the other side, but every time she thought she might being going to far, she'd look at Jack, and he'd just smile at her and refuse to tell her where that line is.

 

“I'm sorry Vlad.” She wants to say, because if it wasn't for Jack, she could love him as he is.

 

But she doesn't, because she cares for Vlad, but not enough to betray Jack's love, and it's a hard decision, but one that has to be made.

 

But of course “has to” and other definites are just suggestions to Jack. There are a lot of reason's Maddie loves that creativity of his, and his wild, impossible ideas are a big part of it.

 

So yes the hospital was a part of it, but for her, it really, truly starts in the apartment, and it's all Jack's fault.

 

“Mmmmm.” Jack moans around a fork full of the most delicious chicken breast Maddie has ever eaten in her life. It's the first good meal they’ve had in the apartment, the first home cooked dinner not microwaved in a kitchenette, and while that certainly has some influence it's still a fabulous bird. “Vlad I could eat your cooking forever. You're not allowed to leave.”

 

And Jack doesn't kid the same way most people do. He throws out puns and waggles his brow obscenely but when it comes to exaggerated rhetoric to make a point well... Jack doesn't hide his feelings well. When he says something like that, compliments someone, he usually means it in the most straightforward way possible, so while Vlad brushes Jack off, Maddie pays attention.

 

“No rush Vladdie, take all the time you need, you've got a place here.” He says it time and again, every time that frustration over bills comes up, and Maddie wonder how long that time could be in Jack's head.

 

“Lookin good V-Man!” Jack says when Vlad comes back from a jog in the late evening, sweat fairly glistening off him. 

 

It's true though, Vlad looks so much better now that he's out of the hospital even if he eats like a bird these days. The exercise helps, and she always tries to ply him with some snack or another every time he settles enough to practice with his powers. It's the only time he seems to forget he's not hungry, and the results show in his fuller cheeks, his thicker hair.

 

“Sure is.” She mumbles from her sleepy spot tucked into Jack's ribs. While Vlad perks at the compliment, Jack fairly beams at her, something like proud, and something like excitement, and it's the same look he always gave her in the hospital when she'd do something for Vlad and she'd check his gaze for a line yet crossed. And well... Jack really doesn't hide his feelings well. She starts to wonder, a bit, if it's not that she hasn't crossed that line, but that Jack doesn't know where that line is either. She's not entirely sure what to make of that, but it certainly sounds like something he would do.

 

(Maddie hadn't raised her head enough to see Jack's expression when Vlad first come in, and later she'd wish she had. But when she thinks about all the little things she knows what expression she'd expect, and that's a little scary. She starts to look more, and lo and behold, she's right.)

 

It's a dangerous thought, a dangerous thing to bring out, but far more so to let sit and fester. In the end, her courage finds her in the dark of the night, just at they're dozing off.

 

“Jack, we need to talk.”

 

(In another life, it doesn't start at all. At first, her eyes are only for Jack and when Vlad is gone her eyes have nowhere else to go. Even when it's hard, years together leave her no reason to want for change. And when Vlad shows up again he's pompous and slimy and prideful from 20 years of aggressive politics and self indulgence. This controlling, overwhelming, desperate man is not a man she could ever learn to love.)

 

_----_

 

Jack doesn't _let_ it start, not until Maddie does.

 

Jack's always been a bit of an odd duck. Never quite fit in, so the little group of people he'd collected around him in college are already precious in the short time he knows them, for many other reasons besides, but for their willingness to stay if nothing else.

 

Maddie is... Maddie is the smartest, most wonderful woman he's ever met. She listens when he talks where everyone has always ignored him. She's brilliant beyond measure, nimble fingers and lightning quick mind fixing the things he can't get right. She love's his body, where he's always just been a big lumbering oaf. She understands how his head works, how he has all these thoughts that aren't quite in order. It takes him a moment to figure out which one's he wants to pick and choose, and in the meantime his mouth tends to spit out the bad ones. She knows that when he says “You're amazing”, it means that, and that he loves her, and that she's the only girl for him.

 

And she loves Ghosts!

 

Maddie makes him feel good, and maybe that's selfish, but not a lot of people in his life go out of their way to make him feel good.

 

Vlad makes him feel good too, in his own, special, Vlad way.

 

Oh, they might not have gotten along well at first. Vlad comes from a small rural town who's closest Walmart is two hours away and claims the Packers like they own it. He's always been a big fish in a very small pond, and has very little time or energy for suffering fools.

 

Which is totally righteous, because even though they didn't have a lot in common to start, Vlad stuck around! While Maddie likes to throw around ideas, Vlad likes to argue them, at length, for hours, and makes Jack really think where he wouldn't before.

 

Vlad is, without a doubt, Jack's best friend in the world. He'd have said it before the accident, because Jack's affection is a thing easily won and Vlad was a shy guy. He didn't like to go out and socialize and his hobbies didn't really align with Jack's at all and other than being roommates they didn't really talk all that much. But Vlad went out to crash parties with Jack anyways, he dipped his toe into Jack's passions and found something worth looking at, he hung around for a year and then requested Jack as a roommate agian without even asking.

 

Jack says it even more, after the accident, that Vlad is the best friend he'll ever have, and means it with a ferocity he didn't before. Because Jack messed up horribly. He ruined something in a way that can't be fixed. He's heard Vlad, more than once, probably when he shouldn't have, and knows Vlad blames him. But Vlad stayed, and forgave what shouldn't have been forgiven, and he stayed to give Jack a chance to make it better.

 

He suffers Jack's foolishness and Jack likes to think hes a better man for it.

 

Jack loves Maddie and Vlad both, for much the same reasons. That core of strength, their blazing minds, their understanding of Jack's faults, even if those things present very differently. Maddie is a strong, ferocious woman, and when Jack holds her he feels stronger, for being allowed to stand by her side. Vlad is a prideful, hurt soul, and when Jack holds him he feels stronger, for being allowed to cup all the brittle bits that make Vlad up and be trusted not to break it.

 

And for him, it's that simple.

 

So for him, it kinda starts in the hospital, watching his girlfriend tuck herself in any spot she'll fit against Vlad's side from his place on the pull in bed. It's safer, but Jack doubts he'll sleep, because the image of Vlad's terrified face as he sinks down into the bed is still fresh in his mind. He's fine here anyways, watching his warrior woman cup the thin shards of Vlad and be trusted not to break him either. They work together, and it's as simple as that. Jealousy is a beast best left for things that could be taken from you, and Jack doesn't want this to go away.

 

And so it's months later down the road, and Vlad, if not good, is better than he was. They live together in their tiny apartment and Jack's got some idea of how things could be _better,_ but the good he's got right now isn't quite worth the risk. It will be, sooner or later, because as good as it is, Vlad is lonely in a way Jack doesn't know quite yet how to sooth, but right now he's content.

 

“Jack, we need to talk.”

 

And whooh boy, that’s a loaded statement if he's ever heard one.

 

It's a long night. And he doesn't really let it start until then.

 

(In another life, Jack looses his best friend far earlier than he ever would have chosen, and gets him back just long enough for regrets.)

 

_----_

 

“Jack, are you in love with Vlad?”

 

She want's him to say no, that she's mistaken, because she knows what yes means in reality. Yes means boohoo, you picked yourself a real rotten apple Maddie, one of them gay boys that don't know up from down until they stick it to a woman for a while and decide it's not for them. (And not for the first time, she knocks her father's voice back out of her business)

 

It's not the question she had meant to ask, it's not even the suspicion she really had, but once she asks it...

 

She wants him to say yes. “Yeah, aren't you?”

 

He says neither, just wrinkles his wide brow, really thinks about it in a matter more serious than she's used to from him.

 

“I don't know Mads.” and it's true, and she knows it's true because she doesn't know either. There's a million questions on her tongue, all the different ways she's tried to figure out this situation of theirs, but Jack opens his mouth first. “The way he looks at you Maddie, he's so lonely.” It's not a question, it's a statement, their shared acknowledgment of it, and her chest aches in sympathy.

 

“So what do you want to do about it Jack?

 

Silence reigns heavy in the dark of their room. Words... don't come easy between them. Jack stumbles over them too clumsily, she gets him too easily. They aren't often needed. But he can't seem to find the words, and she can't seem to read him, and she needs words now.

 

“Do you... would you be ok, if something happened between Vlad and I?” She hopes it doesn’t sound like an admittance of guilt. Nothing has happened. Maddie knows what the wrong side of the line looks like, even if she hasn't crossed it. She also hopes it doesn't sound like a threat. Something like that is not to be taken lightly, not with Vlad, not with his admiration of her. Anything less than her all would only be cruel in the long run. But if Jack can't point out that line then she needs to find it.

 

Again Jack takes neither path that had first come to her mind. Instead of anger, instead of raised hackles or worry, Jack's chest bellows out with a shudder. She hasn't lifted her head from his shoulder, but his arm is more than long enough that his hand has plenty of room to drag down her body to squeeze her hips, her ass, while his other hand comes up to cup himself over his sweat pants. The words that come tumbling out of his mouth have that flow to it that Maddie is quite familiar with. It means he's got half a dozen thoughts sparking in his brain at once and this one has shot right through his paper thin filters and between his teeth.

 

“Can I watch?” And the chuckle that punches out of him is humorless as it is aroused. “God Maddie could we have that, could we?”

 

And just like that the idea is planted. The pieces slide into place and she understands what Jack is trying to tell her, has been trying to tell her for a long while now.

 

Who needs lines anyways when you can draw your own boundaries? Who even gets to decide who stands on which side?

 

She kisses him, because Jack is a fantastic human being with a brilliant mind and she wants to encourage that creativity forever, and it's not until much later in the predawn that she realizes that there's a whole integral part of this concept they neglected.

 

“Jack,” she pants from the other side of the bed, because even in the late spring chill she hot and sweaty and needs a moment to relax. “Just touching bases.... are we seducing Vlad?” and that gets her the kind of booming laughter she's sure is heard three floors down.

 

“Maddie, I'm pretty sure there's not a lot you could do that Vlad wouldn't consider seduction. Me on the other hand...” and his brow wrinkles as his thought arrange themselves “I want...?”

 

She pats whatever is closest to her, which turn out to be a forearm, to let him know she understands. What they may want may not be what Vlad may want. It's a difficult thing to touch without possibly burning some bridges they don't want burned. They'll let it simmer for now, just between themselves.

 

_----_

 

There's simmer, and then there's a rolling boil. But whatever it is it's fun as hell.

 

But then Jack is the sort of man to get lost in his excitement, and she's the sort of woman who loves getting lost in it too sometimes.

 

Gone are the small, safe compliments, and Vlad nearly glows at times from Jack's generous praise. Jack gets handsy, an arm over Vlad's neck as they all walk to a downtown restaurant to relax (Maddie suspects its more of a date), a clap on the back easing down to rest in the narrow dip of Vlad's spine and staying, pulling Vlad close on their ugly green couch, and Vlad doesn't push him away. Hugs are tossed around like confetti, easy affection that riles Vlad's dander enough to let them know he's affected. 

 

Summer creeps in and she takes great pleasure in wearing Jack's loose clothes, using the heat as an excuse to roll around half naked and watch Vlad squirm. Getting to see Vlad's developing body in his underwear is a plus, even if it's a million degrees.

 

“Look Maddie” Jack tells her with is eyes, a nod of his head and it's fun, appreciating Vlad in this light together, exploring this new obsession that's they both share. It's even fun watching most of it fly right over Vlad's head.

 

“Look at him Vlad.” she silently begs. Jack's soul is all but transparent to her, because she understands him in a way she hadn't expected to come so naturally, but Vlad makes it hard to crack him on purpose. Even if he's not pushing Jack away, he's not pulling him closer either, and it's impossible for her to tell how safe a risk it would be.

 

(in the end, as he always does, Jack takes the risk, jumps the hurdle, flies face first into the unknown, and she's left scrabbling behind trying to lay a safer foundation)

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next week is Vlad and the last chapter!
> 
> (I really, truly wish that I could say that the odd pacing and repetitiveness in Jack's thoughts are entirely on purpose to reflect his own thought patterns but that's not entirely true. While I did make an attempt at that, Jack is HARD to write. If you guys want more Jack POV in the future you better ask for it.)


	6. The When and the Why: 06

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The final Chapter. Vlad and what we've been waiting for.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (IT STILL COUNTS IF I POST IT BEFORE MIDNIGHT!)

 

If you'd ask him, years down the road when their chicks start to fly off, Vlad would say it started in college. By that time, his love for Maddie is an old, steadfast thing that's been a part of his life longer than it hasn't. He's lived with his wife for years, seen her in some very unflattering situations, gotten to know the woman she actually is, and the pedestal he had placed her on has been beaten to rubble. He's far enough removed from that time that he looks upon it fondly, and in reflection it's intensity and possessiveness are not unlike what he feels now, and he mistakes it for young love.

 

It's also, with a fair bit of embarrassment and time to reflect, with the safety of years behind them and a changing world, that college is where he quotes his, for lack of a better term, awareness of Jack.

 

Not love, or a certain degree of caring. They'd been roomates, but sharing an unsupervised living space at a time when Jack was all smelly, sleep deprived, and occasionally drunk bachelor was not an environment conductive to much more than a sort of annoyed and reluctant affection. Their fairly one sided rivalry for Maddie's time was also a factor, and the more Maddie seemed to like Jack the less Vlad could stand him.

 

It was safer that way. Appreciation is one thing, but attraction in any form to another man is dangerous, even in a milquetoast community like theirs. So appreciation of the cut of Jack's back through his skintight hazmat, the way his biceps used to bulge the seams of his sleeves when he wore casual clothes, his thick dark hair and dimpled smile... those can certainly be appreciated, but anything else was practically courting one of those hammer like fists to put Vlad's nose through his skull.

 

Why stick his neck out like that, had been his college self's reasoning, when Maddie was just as lovely and beloved? So he puts all his “love” into Maddie, every spare moment he can claim with her. And when she isn't there, when there's no way to distract himself, he can certainly appreciate 1am chats by lamplight from their respective beds, or fiddling with equations on a commandeered blackboard until they're both red in the face, or sharing a basket of loaded fries and getting drunk at a sports bar while Vlad tries to explain that his love for the Packers is because they are mathematically superior and not “Just because”.

 

Caring comes later. He lets it come, when he sees them together and despite the hurt he feels, the loneliness that creeps in, it starts to get pushed away by they realization that they're not leaving. That he's still their friend. It hurts less, when they should have their own lives and still Vlad makes up a big part of it. The anger burns cooler when despite having each other, they still reach out and give him a space to matter in when he needs it. And every time the panic washes out and he pieces himself back together he leaves a little bit of the things he doesn't like behind, leaves room for something else to form instead.

 

For Vlad, it starts in those first weeks in the hospital, when it felt like the fat under his skin had boiled to liquid and he could feel his body fry in the aftermath. It starts when he begins to realize that he's got two people left in this world who care for him and they're right there.

 

(In another life, Vlad is left alone with a void where they used to be. He tries to fill that void, with hate and greed and self righteousness. In loosing his humanity, he defines himself by how others see him even as he uses that same lack of humanity to hold himself above. Like a dragon with it's hoard, he claws and scrapes everything he sees as close as he can and shoves it into that ache in his chest until it festers and molds and warps so badly there's no way Jack and Maddie could ever fit in there again.)

 

(In another life, in another million lives, everything plays out how it will, and the few and infinite beings who can trace everything back to that one, infinitesimal moment where this timeline is not like any other will argue that no timeline is the same. For them, time is always moving in more ways that people can understand, forwards and backwards and weaving around itself sideways in primordial knots. There is no beginning, only what is and always has been and will be, and even asking them is a waste of their infinite and precious time.)

 

__----__

 

 _It_ , capital I and all, starts with a fight.

 

Not a big fight, but a regular one.

 

Vlad's parent's were both to some extent the products of post WWII immigration, displaced workers who'd outlived their parents in German work camps and had nowhere to go when released back to their home country. Their lives in America had started poor, and while they'd waited for money to have their only child, and lived their American dream, they'd died nearly as poor as they'd lived. A lifetime of work for a house with taxes too big if Vlad wanted to use their life savings to educate himself, as was his only family's wishes.

 

Describing his childhood, people call him lucky. He'd grown up with canning vegetables twice a year and only eating mushrooms and blackberries when you can pick them in the spring. Dad would disappear for weeks into the woods behind a coworker's house, the payment for it being smaller than a hunting license, and their antique ice chest would be full of turkey and venison all winter. Vlad's sheets were handwashed and smelled of cut grass, his pants were always neatly hemmed, their furniture was all hand made. He had his pick of a million half feral cats that bred under his front porch and never spent more time indoors than he was forced too.

 

While it may sound idyllic and fun on paper, the reality was that Vlad had been poor. Canning vegetables and hunting your own meat was necessary when you spend years trying to pay off home and land and there's nothing left to eat on. They only went to the grocery store when they absolutely had to, for the things they couldn’t make themselves. His Mother never really succeeded in hiding the embarrassed tears she always wicked away as quickly as they fell in the car after keeping up a check out line, having to meticulously flip through the hours of work in coupon clipping she'd done, the little pocket of foodstamps she buries as far down her purse as she can manage. His sheets were hand washed because having their laundry washed cost to much, and a home unit cost even more. His clothes were always hemmed and pressed because his mother put all her energy into her mothering, trying desperately to be that perfect American Wife, and that meant not letting others know that her child wears thrift clothing with worn out hems. Furniture was hand made because there's always someone who makes it in farm country, and his father's work and time in compensation was a lot cheaper than their money at a retailer. They had cats to keep away the mice and roaches that lives in the down road fields and he went outside because there was always a million and one little chores needed doing and reading is a lot more enjoyable uninterrupted.

 

Vlad had grown up poor, with parents who had scrubbed and sewn and washed and worked themselves into early graves. And that sort of thing leaves a mark.

 

They have cash, yes, between Maddie and Jack, but all of Vlad's attempts to contribute are often nipped in the bud. Vlad should get a job whether they like it or not, but even with all his physical activity Vlad's still weak, and 6 pm sounds like an amazing bed time most days. It's one thing to do push ups on the floor for the last 15 minutes it will take for the pizza to get delivered or to jog around the block once or twice. It's another to be awake and moving for 8 hours, and Vlad's not sure how he's going to manage school yet without spacing his classes. Work sounds exhausting to just think, and between that and their disapproving frowns when he brings it up, there's not much will to fight it.

 

Stealing stuff helps. Vlad see's no reason why he should have to pay for scar creams that might not work if he can avoid it. Candy is a treat and a waste of money that should be used productively. Little things they all would enjoy and shouldn't have to pay for anyways.

 

Picking pockets only gets him so far when neither of them will take his money, and this little game they've been playing for a while of hiding cash in each others wallets and belongings is long getting old.

 

(Jack leaving college to work may be his decision, but it's _killing_ Vlad. His father had broke his back doing manual labor until the day he died, and while his father had died with the pride of a provider, he'd left Vlad very few memories of anything other than his father's pain and exhaustion. Jack is _too smart_ for that kind of life.)

 

It's that splinter Vlad can't work out of his skin, and so it's an old fight he can't let go.

 

“Jack,” Vlad interrupts from his place on the couch, because it's important to make sure to have this man's undivided attention when it comes to explaining things in small words. “You can not work construction full time. You're never going to get your feet off the ground if you spend all your time and energy stacking bricks all day.”

 

Jack just gives him that same stupid dimpled grin he's given Vlad every time this comes up and waves him off. “I don't even have a place set up to tinker in yet, so don't worry about it V-man-”

 

“I'm GOING to worry about it!” and a fight is still a fight even if there's no shouting, but shouting still feels better than having to listen to the same, patronizing phrases parroted at him. He can't not worry about it when they're sitting on the couch with the bills spread out on their criminally low coffee table. He can't ever seem to stop worrying about it. The silence from both his roomates is shocked and very satisfying. Every decibel that builds feels good. “I'm going to worry about what's going to happen in a month when Maddie moves to weekends. I'm going to worry about it three months from now when snow sets in and you can't find work because no one builds anything in the winter. I'm going to worry a year from now when the lease it up and I've got no money to move out on!”

 

Maddie speaks first, barley audible over Vlad's heavy breathing and the pounding in his ears that's half panic.“You don't have to move out.”

 

He stands up, groans, tugs at his hair because the don't get it.

 

“Of course I do!” He snaps. Apparently he's the only one in this house with any foresight. “You think I'm stupid? Maybe not a year from now, maybe before then, but sometime soon you guys are going to want you're own space for your little love nest and I don't plan on being left out in the cold!”

 

“Hey now.” Jack grabs his wrist as Vlad passes him in his pacing and Vlad snarls at him, eye's flashing red and cheeks flushing blue. But those features are slowly becoming more familiar over things far less threatening, like breakfast cereal and late night bathroom breaks. Hints of sharp teeth barley phase them, especially when they know it's not on purpose. Jack is somehow faster, and before Vlad gets the concentration collected to make his wrist pass like vapor through Jack's fist Jack has already tugged him down on couch, stopping his pacing.

 

“Vlad.” Maddie tries again, slower this time. “You don't have to move out.” She cuts him off with a wave of her hand.

 

Sighing, she gets up from Jack's other side and eases down onto the loudly protesting coffee table across from Vlad. She shares a look with Jack that Vlad can't fathom, but whatever it means there's some sort of agreement made. “Listen Vlad, we're just worried about you pushing yourself to hard. You worked so hard in school and you're so close, we want to make sure you can concentrate on just that. But I get it, it's why I'm keeping weekends at the dojo. If you're that uncomfortable not having your own money, if you need to get out every once in a while, we won't stop you, but you don't need to feel obligated.” Both of her long fingered hands comes up to grasp at one of his, her painted nails scraping his wrist. “And as for moving out, we won't ever make you. Jack and I have been talking... a lot, and well....?” She bites her lip, obviously thinking, and if it's not the boot, Vlad can't even imagine of what it might be.

 

“We want you to move into our room!” Jack blurts it as if he can't hold it back, only to pause for a second, an idea forming in his head. “You're so worried I don't have a work space, we could turn your old room into one.” He thunks the back of his hand across Vlad's thigh. “There we go, problem solved!”

 

“My bed wont fit on your room, that pile of springs you call a mattress barley fits.”

 

“Well,” Jack starts, sharing a smile with Maddie as one of her hands lets go of Vlad's and starts to creep back and forth on his thigh. “we were hoping you'd sleep in ours.”

 

Oh sweet snickerdoodles. Vlad's not sure if he's fallowing all this correctly. He covers his face with the hand not being held so he doesn't have to look directly into either of their eyes. Panic starts to swell in the catch of his throat and the bottom of Vlad's stomach _drops_.

 

“Are you two asking me to have a threesome?”

 

Jack whimpers and Maddie laughs under her breath and embarrassment makes him flush at how _stupid_ a question that was even as sweet relief rushes over him.

 

“That's going a little fast there.” Maddie pats the hand she's holding, continues rubbing his thigh, and waits. Jack's arm comes out and over his shoulder like it tends to do when they veg on the couch, but the touch of hesitation is new. They wait until Vlad rubs his face and drops his hand again. Glancing at both of them, well, at least they aren't angry. “We're looking for something a bit more... long term Vlad. You don't have to move into our bedroom right now,” Jack honest to god _pouts_ next to him. “or ever.” and this seems to be more directed at Jack than him. Jack somehow pouts harder. the subtly wrinkled brow developing as Jack sucks on his upper lip. “But, come with us this weekend on our date night?” the words barley leave her mouth before she sees the look on his face, how Vlad's trying to twist the question into something less insane. “Not “with us” like a tag along, like, “with us” a date. We all go together, and it's a date.”

 

“With each other.” Jack adds helpfully.

 

Vlad groans and leans down until his blazing face nearly touches his legs and he doesn't have to look at them anymore, because what has his life even become? He's not entirely sure if this is a dream or a nightmare or if he got hit by a bus while grabbing groceries earlier and this whole evening is just the wildly firing neurons in his brain grasping at half formed fantasies before he dies. But the reality of it leaves Vlad hard pressed to say this is the craziest thing that's ever happen to him, and he's not even sure he's completely human anymore.

 

Maddie's hand is still brushing back and forth, back and forth across his thigh so lightly he'd nearly forgotten about it. Jack's hand eases from his shoulder until his it rests on the taut tendons running up Vlad's neck and gently push into them. A spark runs up his spine and it's almost to much all at once, and he should say no. There's a million and a half reasons he should say no, excluding the ones that whatever insanity has made his roomates (his best friends) blind to. This is going to ends very, very poorly.

 

But the answer tumbles forth from his mouth and he doesn't immediately want to take it back.

 

“Ok.” and a slightly hysterical chuckle burbles forth. “ok, it's a date.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Welp this is it, the last chapter of A Million Points in Time. However this is not the end of the story. I'll be starting a little anthology after series, A Million and One, which should be posted shortly after this chapter, so keep an eye out.
> 
> In fact, to celebrate breaking 100 Kudos and 1000 hits, I want to do a little thing. If you've got a particular scenario you really want explored (including nsfw) drop it into my askbox at my tumblr, Nellynee, and I'll use a randomizer to pick one and give it priority, winner announced next Wednesday at the new story with it's first chapter. If it goes well, I might do it every 100 kudos or hits, we'll see.
> 
> I'll see all you guys at the other story ;3

**Author's Note:**

> Inspiration for this chapter
> 
> http://ghost-chicky.tumblr.com/image/143757588297
> 
> Dr. Adams is an actual character in Chicky's AU, more info on him and his inevitable role here. (spoilers)
> 
> http://ghost-chicky.tumblr.com/post/63193198247/hello-there-chicky-i-was-thinking-about-family


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